Writer: Simon Furman
Artist: Alex Milne
Publisher: IDW
Price: $3.99
Release Date: Late February

Spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

For those who are unaware of such things, Arcee is a female Transformer that showed up in the Transformers Animated movie back in the eighties. Instantly baffling to everyone who stopped to think about why robots would need genders, matters weren’t helped by colouring her pink in some misguided attempt to get that generation’s buyers of My Little Pony interested. Luckily, Arcee didn’t seem content with staying at home and transforming into a kitchen sink and was more often than not fighting alongside the lads. Even though, to be honest it’s a bit of a hard sell, and so having a spotlight issue for her goes some way to show how strong the IDW Transformer comics are in terms of quality and dedicated readership. Believe me, you’re all going to want to get this issue.

Simon Furman has made Arcee into a devastating force of nature, a destructive revenge machine that will destroy anyone or thing that gets in her way. She wants someone’s head and will not stop until she gets it. Quite frankly, she has serious mental issues going on. It’s a brave move that makes a lot of sense, Arcee is more than equal to those around her, in fact she goes toe-to-toe with some big hitters here and more than holds her own.

The chaos that blows through this issue is superbly rendered by Alex Milne, I think this might be some of the best work I’ve seen from him. Highly detailed and dynamic, Alex goes through page after page with a deft storytelling skill, there are hardly any instances when it isn’t apparent what is happening - even when the action really heats up.

Furman creates a great stand-alone issue, but also manages to chuck in more continuity elements than you would think possible. I won’t go into to much detail, but alongside Arcee’s motivation for destruction there are: gestalts, Banzaitron, Ultra Magnus, Jetfire, and a hint at a device that is going to cause a lot of trouble. And that’s not even half of the goodies contained within this issue for those following the overarching storylines running throughout IDW’s Transformers titles.

Elements of that issue I mentioned back at the start of this review about questioning why robots need gender in the first place are answered here, although they actually raise more questions in my mind. Jhiaxus is the culprit, fundamentally changing Arcee’s coding to create the first female Transformer and then tossing her aside like a failed experiment. Aside from really quite distasteful comments about post-op Tran-nies or PMS (the experiment has apparently left Arcee awash with conflicting sensory perceptions including a link to Jhiaxus, but definitely not the ability to hunt down shoe shops) that I won’t bore you with, the mental effects of this experimentation are apparent to see with Arcee hell-bent on getting hold of Jhiaxus. What was the motivation for introducing gender? Was it just done for the sake of doing it? Whilst we may or may not get answers to these questions soon, we are sure to be in for a hell of a ride. The conclusion of this issue certainly suggests there is one serious smackdown coming.

So whilst I am not convinced this is going to bring in a swath of female readers, nor does it’s content hold up to well in presenting a female transformer as rational (this may well be purposeful, Jhiaxus would certainly be interested in creating more chaotic Transformers) it does successfully re-create Arcee as the Autobot most likely to kill you than give you the time of day. For that reason alone, this is great stuff.

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